While you can change some of your session parameters (such as the language or the timezone), you can’t change the character set.

What Oracle Character Sets are Most Useful?

I’ve seen that UTF8 is quite popular (specifically called AL32UTF8). This is a character encoding for the Unicode character set, which uses one byte per character.

UTF16 is similar but uses two bytes per character.

The actual character set you choose will depend on your requirements for your data. When choosing a character set, note that it cannot be changed unless you drop and recreate the database, or perform a migration (which is not easy).

So, there’s my brief explanation of character sets and how you can see them in Oracle. I haven’t had a lot to do with them but sometimes it’s just good to know.

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